Wednesday, June 11, 2008

When I was looking at the game Netherlands - Italy at the Euro 2008 championship I couldn't believe my eyes. The Netherlands won with 3-0.

Some people are betting on the game in DG Tournament and I wondered how many people bet that score! Instead of looking at all bets in a report I decided to create a chart.

In my presentations at the Oracle conferences (ODTUG, IOUG, OOW, UKOUG, ...) and on our Oracle APEX training days I often say that a picture tells more than 1000 words. So the proof is in this Statistics page again. Tell me, what do you find easier, going through the report or just looking at the chart?

In the chart you see all games and a bar which represent the betting of the game: Wrong,Good (means you knew who won) or Exact (you bet the exact score).For the match Netherlands-Italy NOBODY predicted that score! It's easier to see it in the bar, there's no green and the red bar is the highest among the other games.

Some people asked me how to create a drill-down chart in APEX. The above example is a drill-down one. You can click on the bar and the Interactive Report and the pie chart will show only the details of that game. What you have to do to get it working is: create an hidden item and in the link of your chart you link the hidden item with the value (primary key). In the query of the "child" chart and report you add that hidden item in the where clause. Whenever you submit the page, the hidden item gets filled and the report filtered.